AP Photo
Pablo Alvarado speaks at a protest rally at MacArthur Park, in the Rampart Division near downtown Los Angeles, March 15, 2011.
This article is part of our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.
Pablo Alvarado is the founder and co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). This oral history is based on interviews with Prospect editor at large Harold Meyerson.
I grew up in the El Salvador countryside, with no electricity and no running water. My father had only gone through third grade, my mother never went to school, but they forced all of us kids to go to school; we were lucky in that sense.
As I was growing up, I saw what political violence can do. I saw workers who were asking for a minimum-wage increase or to organize a co-op become targets of death squads. I saw one of my own teachers being killed. I heard the sounds of people being tortured.
I saw how power works in my own village. The only place where we could play soccer belonged to the biggest landowner, who came from a powerful military family. All the families with young people met with representatives of his family and negotiated a deal: They’d lease the field and pay the landowner so the children could play soccer.
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But the next day, the landowner took down the goals and prepared the land to grow corn. They ignored the agreement. My father, who was the president of the village soccer club, decided to occupy the land and that night the peasants put the goals back. But the landowner and his people came over, carrying guns. I was right in the middle of this.
We lost the field. The landowner won. That was my first lesson in power dynamics. Injustice won.
Many years later, when we had come to the U.S., we put together a villagers’ committee here that sent money back that helped build a new soccer field.
Once I’d learned to read, when I was still a boy, I began teaching villagers how to read. At the university, from 1987 until 1989, I kept teaching; I ran literacy programs in villages—“dangerous places” to do that. I also helped coordinate health programs for peasants; that was the last thing I did in El Salvador [before death threats forced him to flee to the United States].
That’s how literacy works; you have to teach concepts and when you find inequities, you have to take action.
I arrived in the U.S. when I was 22—in kind of a shock. It was hard to learn the language. I was a day laborer from 1990 to 1995. I stood on street corners waiting for work; I worked on demolition jobs; I learned carpentry and drywalling; I did gardening and house painting. And I worked in a factory for a couple of years.
I’d work from 7 in the morning to 6 at night, then went to ESL classes. I took English from 101 to 105, and went to college, not for the degree, but I wanted to learn psychology, political science, and the history of California.
In the factory, workers didn’t know how to read and write, in English or Spanish. I began teaching them during work breaks. In 1992, I began teaching on Saturdays in Pasadena, when I was still learning English. Half of the students were day laborers. In time, I met people who knew about the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire. We started the Coalition of Popular Educators of Southern California (later the Institute of Popular Education) in North Hollywood. My teaching methodology wouldn’t allow me just to teach syllables, but the content of the word, its history, the meaning behind it. That’s how literacy works; you have to teach concepts and when you find inequities, you have to take action.
In the classes, workers began telling of how their wages were stolen, how the police harassed them every day, how neighbors sprayed water and pulled guns on them, how racist groups attacked them. They brought these stories into the classroom, and I began making sense of my own experiences as a worker.
In 1992, I started accompanying these workers when they had a grievance, though I still barely spoke English. I had to write down and memorize what I told the employer. But the first time I did this, I was too belligerent. I said, “If you don’t pay us now, we’ll protest!” I learned in time that in most cases like this, the problem was just a matter of miscommunication, of the misunderstandings that come from speaking different languages and working without written contracts. In these cases, negotiations would generally work.
In the factory where I also worked, the workers mainly had come from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. During the 45-minute break, we would go to a soccer field close to the factory and play: the Mexicans against the Guatemalans or the Salvadorans, the Salvadorans against the Guatemalans. It was horrible, they played to hurt the players from the other country. I went to a foreman and said, “Why don’t we organize a team where all the workers can play together against teams not from the factory?” When we formed that team, the conflicts ended. We’d play on Saturdays and Sundays, and we were part of the same team.
On a volunteer basis, I began to organize soccer teams among the day laborers, too, in Pasadena. It was becoming clear that organizing day laborers could begin by organizing them around soccer, organizing them as teammates. In January 1996, I was hired to run the day laborer organizing project by CHIRLA [the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, based in Los Angeles]. I was a paid organizer, and I worked 16 hours a day because I loved what I was doing!
Day laborers were generally viewed as unorganizable, marginal workers, but we demonstrated otherwise. On many corners, they came to agreement to set wage standards for themselves, to reverse a process that had been a race to the bottom. I worked on enabling them just to keep working, just to have the right to assemble on corners to get work.
Day laborers were generally viewed as unorganizable, marginal workers, but we demonstrated otherwise.
When I began working for CHIRLA, I would go to two particular street corners, both in front of HomeBase (now Home Depot) stores, that were patrolled by the L.A. County sheriffs. Tensions between the workers and merchants would often escalate to near-violence, the sheriffs would abuse their authority, and the stores would hire private security guards, some of them racists, who were abusive, too. Many people in the neighborhoods had preconceived notions about day laborers—that they were littering, loitering, drinking in public, and by their presence devaluing their property. That was the norm on many corners.
But you can change people’s notions. In Woodland Hills [a Los Angeles neighborhood in the nether reaches of the San Fernando Valley], the workers would stand on a corner just north of the Ventura Freeway. The northside is a wealthy community of homeowners; the south side is apartments with Latino tenants. The homeowners objected; we had a meeting with the Woodland Hills Homeowners Association [a notoriously obstreperous group active in L.A. politics—HM] where 400 people were screaming at us. All they wanted, it turned out, was for the laborers to move just south of the freeway. After the meeting, I asked the workers if they would lose any business if they moved to the south side. They said no; two days later, we moved. All that the homeowners had needed to do was talk to the workers.
I brought eight workers to the next homeowners’ meeting; when we came in, those 400 people applauded us. That’s what happens when you humanize a conflict. Later, the workers did a day of community cleanup. Relations became very good—and that was a source of workers’ power.
As cities tried to keep the workers off the sidewalks in the early 1990s, they began enacting anti–day laborer ordinances banning them from standing on sidewalks. We said it was a form of speech and assembly protected by the First Amendment. Between 1992 and 2012, we took 20 municipalities that had enacted such ordinances to court. We didn’t just take them to court. Every time we sued a city, with did a march with our allies—that showed the police that we weren’t alone in this. When we’d organize a corner, neighbors and merchants would come to meet with us. We’d look for local residents who were sympathetic, and to local civil rights groups. We’d build a coalition. We were building power for the historically marginalized.
Once hearings began, the workers filled the courtrooms. It was an education for them and for the judges, it put a human face on what was at stake.
We kept winning these cases. After a time, a number of cities, including Glendale, Burbank, and Pasadena, said they’d open a day laborer center and give us funds to run it, but they’d still ban the gatherings on street corners. In return, we had to agree not to sue them over their ordinance. We said no. We knew that poor people need options. If there’s a day labor center, workers should go there voluntarily, not be brought there by the police, in handcuffs, because they were arrested for standing on a street corner. We challenged these cities in court, and won.
In 2012, one case—against the city of Redondo Beach—went all the way up to the federal Ninth Circuit. The Court ruled that standing on the sidewalk was a right that day laborers were entitled to. Redondo Beach appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to hear the appeal. By that time, there were too many court rulings that upheld the day laborers under the First Amendment.
To build a powerful organization, most of our work was on the street corners, but we did need a more dignified and safer place where workers could both learn and set wage standards for themselves. That’s when we began thinking about establishing and running worker centers ourselves. We knew if you want to make a worker center attractive to a laborer, we had to make it better than a corner. We established a number around Los Angeles, and some, in Harbor City and around Hollywood, are still open.
In late ’96, I contacted a day laborer leader in San Francisco and asked if we could come up and have a soccer game with them. We went up there around Thanksgiving, first to the worker center, then to the soccer field. The teams began talking with each other: What was the pay in L.A.? What did you do if you weren’t paid? How do you deal with the police?
That was the informal beginning of NDLON [the National Day Laborer Organizing Network]. On a soccer field.
I realized there must be people in other cities doing this, bringing day laborers together. We began talking to each other. We had groups in nine cities, most providing services to day laborers and not yet really organizing them. In the process, they came to realize they had to build power, to organize.
So we did visits to other cities. We took visitors to L.A. around to our corners, to see our soccer teams (we had 20 by then). We developed a leadership development school. Eventually, the organizers called for building a national network, with a national coordinating committee.
I realized there must be people in other cities doing this, bringing day laborers together. We began talking to each other.
At that time, day laborers were mainly clustered on both coasts. We held regional meetings in 1998, ’99, and 2000 that led to the first-ever national assembly, in July 2001 in Northridge. We’d just won a lawsuit against Agoura Hills, and we took everybody there, including about 25 media outlets. We talked about the future of immigrants and what we could do to secure their legalization. We set our program. And it was in this meeting that NDLON was officially established.
We celebrate our 20th anniversary this year. Today, there are 70 day labor worker centers, half of them created between 2000 and 2005. But those first five years coincided with a wave of anti-immigrant activity. The Minutemen viewed the day laborers standing on street corners as the most emblematic demonstration of the country being invaded; they staged 50 demonstrations against us just in January of 2006. As these conflicts intensified, we pushed back, particularly in our campaign against [Maricopa (Arizona) County Sheriff Joe] Arpaio. We sustained that for years until he was voted out of office, and when Arizona passed SB 1070 [which expanded police powers against anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant], we actually moved our national office to Phoenix and began the national fight against that law. It’s our members, after all, who are disproportionately attacked and deported.
In California, we led the fight for legislation that forbids cooperation between ICE and local police departments, and a law to turn California into a sanctuary state; our people drafted the bill. We turned out demonstrators against watering down the bill; along with the Dreamers, we occupied Jerry Brown’s office to secure a strong law.
I’m a union guy; our organizations exist for the same reason. But unions are a microcosm of society; some are progressive, some are not. In 1994, we fought to establish a worker center in Pasadena, and the city finally agreed to one location, which was between two union local headquarters, the IBEW [International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers] and the Operating Engineers. They didn’t want “illegals” between their buildings, so that killed off that location. And in 1999, when the AFL-CIO held its national convention in L.A., we were escorted off the floor.
But we had friends in the labor movement who pushed unions to better understand and support us, particularly Miguel Contreras [who headed the Los Angeles AFL-CIO from 1996 to 2005]. In 2006, we brought a delegation of union officials from the California AFL-CIO and the national office to our worker corner in Agoura Hills. On that day, workers were arguing about where they should set their hourly wage minimum: $12.50 or $15? There were about 100 workers there and there was a lot of back-and-forth. Some said they couldn’t do drywall and so thought that $15 was too high. Others pointed out that the next corner was many miles away, so their prospective employers really had no place else to go.
Then they voted; there were 85 for $15 and 15 against. That wasn’t enough of a resolution for Virgilio, the corner’s chosen leader. These guys, he said, indicating the 15, are gonna drive your wages down. The No voters then changed to Yes voters.
When the union officials saw that, they recognized it: That’s how unions start; that’s the heart of what a union is. (By the way, this demand for a $15 wage came six years before fast-food workers in New York began demanding it.)
We’re all workers, and our rights don’t end at the U.S.-Mexico border.
We started talking with LIUNA [the Laborers’ International Union of North America] and the AFL-CIO and they began coming to our conventions. Our worker centers were admitted to a number of CLCs [central labor councils, which are the local bodies of the AFL-CIO]. Our members could join LIUNA in some localities. In New Jersey, we worked with LIUNA to jointly build Local 55 of the union, and LIUNA worked with us to kill state anti-immigrant legislation. National AFL-CIO President John Sweeney negotiated an agreement between us and the national organization, and Rich Trumka, his successor, brought us onto the main stage at a later national AFL-CIO convention—a little more than a decade after we’d been escorted off the floor.
We’re all workers, and our rights don’t end at the U.S.-Mexico border. We’ve promoted an understanding within labor that worker centers are parallel to the official labor movement and should be integrated into it.
We train a lot on health and safety; it’s our members who are brought in to clean up after natural disasters. We trained 5,000 day laborers in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. When the pandemic started, we debated keeping our centers open; in fact, they flourished. They became food hubs, and when people in the neighborhood got sick, we brought food to them. We taught our people to hold Zoom meetings; we built a network of seven radio stations, where workers host the broadcasts. We provided testing and vaccines for everyone who came into our centers, not just the day laborers. We raised donations and provided cash assistance to 15,000 workers.
Unions, of course, are well funded, even though they now represent just a tenth of the workforce. Money is a problem for NDLON and other worker centers. Our members give the organization a dollar or two from every job they get, but they can’t afford to give more. The rise of the worker center movement really parallels the rise of a generation of program officers in foundations, who’ve pushed funders to invest in workers and immigrants who can’t enjoy the benefits of a collective-bargaining agreement.
If those officers go away, we go away: That’s how fragile we are. Yes, 70 percent of our day labor centers also receive public funding from localities; that’s an achievement that day laborers worked for and should feel proud about. We need these municipalities, and others, to do more of the funding. By investing in these centers, communities are investing in their future.
This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
